Winter Tree

I love using Paynes Grey or Neutral Tint for my monochrome pen and washes, Michael. Your Winter Tree landscape is fantastic!

Your stick and ink paintings are my favourite of your works Michael, you make them flow so naturally. I use Paynes grey occasionally, especially in skies. You've inspired me to get the bottle out....ink that is! Is that a puddy tat climbing up the tree?

I like this a lot Michael and it works very well. Though like Robert it's the use is P G as shadow I object to. I always mix from the colours I have used. But this is lovely as a painting using P G .

If there is a colour that is manufactured then I don't see why it should not be used. It all depends how heavily it is used in a painting but yours is just right and I love how using a stick has made your marks very interesting Michael.

Nice, I guess it's not just the colour but a bit of skill too.

You've made a good point here Michael - of course it's also how you use the colour and the paint!

Beautiful work Michael - as always.

Painted by a master!

Thanks so much everyone for kind comments - just a simple painting and it is so encouraging to get such feed back. I have to say that the more the debate continues the more I feel inclined to stick up for it - I think it's perhaps more the way you use it rather the colour itself. In fact with all the talk about it my heart grows fonder.

Thanks for supporting this somewhat rogue colour Michael with this expressive and hopefully persuasive to others study

I have always wondered why PG is so underestimated and even hated. I use it all the time and love it! Lovely winter tree Michael.

On the trail of the lonesome pine! Like that loose sky.

I use a lot of paynes grey, in fact I've just run out of it! Very good work Michael. Love the squiggly ink lines.

Thanks Derek, Satu, Stephen and louise

Used like this I agree it's a marvellous colour and skies like this are beautiful in this much malagined colour . Incidentally you probably know paynes mixed with yellows gives some amazing greens .

Thanks Dermot. yes my favourite is raw sienna for that dusky green of yew and cypress trees - also for the dark shading on the underside foliage of trees.

I love the sky wash Michael. Yes I like paynes grey also neutral tint especially the Schmincke one.

Works well here because it's the dominant colour, deliberately chosen, and works well with whatever else you've used - Ultramarine Violet, you think (not a colour I've actually used much, but I think I might now). I don't know that people are right to say it's "maligned" - the fact is that it doesn't work well with some other colours, most particularly when it's chosen as the invariable hue for making shadows and darker passages; that just seems to me to insult Payne's Grey (or Neutral Tint) by consigning it to the role of a darkening agent: not the best use for it, nor the way to get the best out of it. Rowland Hilder was able to use it for that purpose, though; and he also employed Lamp Black, as well as Neutral Tint - he said of the last of these that it was a tint he'd have been lost without: I think he tended to use it as you do here, though - when he employed it, it wasn't in direct mixes with colour to make it darker, but in glazes/washes over the top and of course in its own right as a colour, eg for distant trees.